Language is something of an operating system. Language also represents a self-propagating, abstract information system - much like culture or socioeconomic reality - that inhabits us just as much as we inhabit it. Human beings, technologies, artefacts and communication systems are the medium through which this linguistic entity manifests and self-replicates. The resilience of this…
The Coronavirus Blues
A few weeks (is it two, or three, now?) into isolation and social distancing, it is all starting to get a bit depressing. Never being anything much of a social butterfly at the best of times, I still feel a visceral burden of dread and anxiety mounting, an overwhelming sense of dread and emptiness. There…
Bad Luck Bamboo and the Magical Indifference of Nature
I got myself some lucky bamboo a few weeks ago, just before the scattered tapestry of our world began rapidly unravelling under the weight of a viral pandemic. It makes me wonder about luck - not because I really believe in anything fundamentally magical or, at least, "lucky" but because superstition and unfounded belief are…
Social Distancing
...and in all of our isolation, our distant alienation from all the life we once knew, when all social contact and that intimacy or literal warmth of another's presence and friendship has become a silent vacuum of absence - what do we have left? We have our empty, listless lives and the dawning awareness that…
The Persistence of False Belief
Do we possess beliefs or do beliefs possess us? Are the distributed, integrated information artefacts and systems of belief actually entities in their own right? Are individual nodes in a networked, self-propagating information system really the storage components for the resilient continuity of an idea, a belief or an ideology? Are the intrinsic errors (within…
Enigma: Cartography of Self
The more that our inner worlds become outer artefacts, the more that our personal lives (now - thoughts) becomes commercial or surveillance data points, the more that the porous boundaries of psychological and material subjectivity disassemble and dissolve. A history, a culture, a civilisation predicated upon the ascendance of individuality (and it's logical complement of…
Dark Logic: The Disinformation Entropy Paradox
A curious, perhaps mischievous, property of complex adaptive systems is that they are autonomously biased towards the means and methods of their own optimal continuity, succinct encoding/self-representation and environmental self-propagation. In this sense, and while acknowledging that diverse actors can and do wilfully generate turbulence and confusion, a listless vessel of policy or doctrine is…
Event Horizon: Life and Death
Entering into life is always and ever to pass across an event horizon towards a dark infinity; all futures, freedom and choice trace an inevitable arc and trajectory towards singularity and extinction. Entropy provides limited degrees of freedom or choice but teleology binds us.
Pandemic: a world under siege
The generalised abstractions of partisan-political, ideological and economic self-interest are able to thrive in dissonant disunity. It is an environment that these abstractions themselves generate and that manifests the context and medium through which they most efficiently and effectively self-replicate. This is, among other things, precisely why the world has ever and always been a…
Entropy Binds
To what extent does a procedural (i.e. temporal) experience of cognition, language, culture and technology bias us towards linear problem-solving and reductionist explanation? The aggregate sum of all (multithreaded) organisational heuristics may itself be a non-linear and adaptively dynamic system as a fact but from an individual thread of experience (within that gestalt), planning, problem-solving…
What is Entropy?
Well, among other things... Entropy is a measure of the "degrees of freedom" available to a system. Generally-speaking, the more components, sub-systems, artefacts, entities that compose a system - the more degrees of freedom that are available to that system. Because there are always more possible disordered system states than ordered ones (in the total…
The Storm is upon us all…
There is a deepening feeling of doom (and gloom) as coronavirus begins to take hold across our community. We see the numbers growing daily; accelerating, exponentiating. At some point this will no longer be "someone else's" illness, it will be upon us; a tidal surge of trillions of sinister nano-scale biological robots, wicked ribonucleic algorithms…
